Did we solve our bandwidth cost crisis?
Hey folks, if you are looking to record and publish your podcast, but you don't want to learn GarageBand or any of these other kind of more complicated sound editing applications, check out alitu.com. That's ali tu.com.
Speaker 2:Hey, everyone. Welcome to build your SaaS. This is the behind the scenes story of building a web app in 2019. I'm John Buda, a software engineer.
Justin:And I'm Justin Jackson, and I'm a product and marketing guy. Follow along as we build transistor.fm. So, John, we got a lot of feedback. We poured out our hearts last week about our bandwidth costs. Yeah.
Justin:And, almost actually so we recorded that on Sunday or Monday. But by the time we'd published, we'd actually already found a solution.
Speaker 2:We did. Yeah. We weren't I yeah. We did. We don't weren't sure it's gonna work.
Speaker 2:I think we're not quite sure if it still is, but we're having our crossing our fingers here. Yeah. But we did get a lot of good feedback. Like, people really kinda suggested a lot of stuff, I think, that we already tried.
Justin:Mhmm. It was interesting because I mean, part of this is just good for us to share what's going on and the the challenges that people might not think about. Actually, I I sent you this clip from, Marco talking on ATP.
Speaker 3:You know, like, if we hosted our podcast on something that was free, I know what it would cost them in bandwidth. I like, we we know that it would cost them probably 1,000 of dollars a month in bandwidth and CDN costs to host our show for free. You can get a lot of scale to to be able to pay for the expensive shows with all the, you know, low traffic shows.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. I'm sure they're I mean, they they have, they have a pretty long episodes, I think Yeah. Plus plus it's popular.
Justin:Yeah. Exactly. So if you have that double combo of, you know, hour, hour and a half episodes, and I'm how how many listeners do they have? 75,000 unique downloads per episode. And they do 4 episodes at least a month, I'm guessing.
Justin:So that's a pretty good chunk. That's 300,000 downloads a month.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's pretty good.
Justin:So yeah. It it really interesting to get all that feedback. We think we found a solution. What did you do? Maybe tell people how you tested out oh, well, maybe we should also say we're not gonna share what we found.
Justin:Right?
Speaker 2:Right. We found a solution that I think is gonna work pretty well. We probably really shouldn't talk about it yet. Mhmm.
Justin:And even if
Speaker 2:But
Justin:even if it works, I don't know if I wanna share it just from a competition based perspective.
Speaker 2:Right. Right. I don't yeah. I mean, I don't think right. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I don't think we're doing anything, like, shady or sketchy.
Justin:No.
Speaker 2:Or, like, violating any terms of service, but but we we've been using it for a couple of week or, well, I guess, a week only. But, yeah, on the surface, it sort of, like, seems too good to be true, so we're sort of gonna keep monitoring and see what happens. But but yeah. So we you know, I found it and finally got it working. There's a couple things I had to configure, and I think I messaged you.
Speaker 2:And I said, hey. Do you mind if I switch over this show, Build Your SaaS, to this new, CDM? Mhmm.
Justin:And you
Speaker 2:were like, yeah. Go for it. And then that that was pretty easy to switch just because of how things are put together. We can sort of swap out the underlying CDN pretty easily. And that worked pretty well, so we then switched over another big show and just to see how that worked.
Speaker 2:And so I think we have our 3 biggest shows now using it. Mhmm. Seems to be working pretty smoothly. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's it's, like, really it's fast. It's, it's global. We had we had a couple problems, in the past with a few locations that weren't working very well, like, I think, Russia and some other locations.
Justin:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And those seem to be working fine.
Justin:You you mean with past CDNs, though, they wouldn't they wouldn't serve
Speaker 2:Yeah. For whatever reason, we had a couple customers reach out to us, and we're like, you know, I have some listeners in Russia or, like, Israel or something, and they were like, they they can't download it
Justin:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:For some reason. So we, we swapped it and it seems to be working.
Justin:Yeah. And and how does that even work? Like, how do you how are you able to swap out individual shows so fast?
Speaker 2:Well, so I I sort of configured, like, a, like, kind of a switch on each show, and I just said, like, if I set this setting on this show, use this use this CDN instead. But on top of that so each episode has has a unique URL that hits our platform. And then when it hits our actual Ruby app, it records the listen or the download. It records all the data that it can get, you know, like, where that listener is and what app they're using to listen to it. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And then it just redirects to the CDN. So that redirect can be whatever you want. Okay. So we just have, like, different different, URLs for each CDN or different subdomains for each CDN that so we can just kinda AB test like that.
Justin:Oh, I see. So you okay. Yeah. That makes sense.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Justin:So you can just redirect it wherever you want. And, theoretically, you could mirror them if you wanted to. You could do all sorts of stuff.
Speaker 2:Right. Yep. You could sort of set up, like, multiple CDNs and randomly choose 1 if you wanted to based on whatever.
Justin:Yeah. And it is it is fast. The the third customer we asked, if we could switch them over to the new CDN was Mike Vardy. Shout out to him for letting us test it on his podcast. But I I I did a test, like I subscribed to his show.
Justin:There's a link to this video in the show notes. Saas.transistor.fm/ 47. But it's super fast, this new CDN. Like, it is unbelievably fast.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Justin:And I'm just looking at our stats so far. There's been since we enabled us 23,000 requests, we've served over 86 gigabytes.
Speaker 2:That's actually just today.
Justin:Oh, that's just today? What the
Speaker 2:Yep.
Justin:Oh, yeah. In the last 24 hours. Oh my No.
Speaker 2:It's almost it's almost a terabyte. Oh my
Justin:god. Yeah. Okay. So I just switched it. So total requests, a 124,000 and 903 gigabytes.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Justin:That is
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's just cranking along.
Justin:You can definitely see the spikes too when someone releases a new show.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Justin:Wow. So fingers crossed that this because this actually will dramatically affect our profitability if this is a good long term solution.
Speaker 2:It's a very, like, predictable cost, I wanna say. Like,
Justin:doesn't yeah. It's not as variable.
Speaker 2:Right.
Justin:Yeah. So So
Jon:we'll see.
Justin:Yeah. We'll see. That's the invest that's the the update on that. Quickly, in terms of something I've been thinking about and chewing on, we we had a call. I can't even remember what that was on Saturday.
Justin:You know, there's these new bootstrapped funds. These funds for bootstrappers. Any.vc, tiny seed, earnest capital. And, you know, we've been trying to decide if we should take some investment now. And, this is kind of, there's some deadlines because some of these funds had, like, they were closing applications these past couple weeks.
Justin:And essentially, the it's anywhere they'll they will, invest anywhere between 50,000 up to 250,000. And most of them will take, 8% equity or up, I believe, except for Ernest Capital who basic they have a return cap. So if you take a 100,000 from them, they want 3 to 5 x back. And, the way they do that is they'll take a portion of your earnings as a founder after you start paying yourself. So for example, if you decided your salary was gonna be, I don't know, is really low, but $50,000 As soon as you hit, like, okay, each of us are getting paid $50,000 a year, we would have to start returning 30% of that number.
Justin:So if you're getting paid 50,000 and I was getting paid 50,000, we would be returning 30,000 start paying back $30,000 in a year.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Okay.
Justin:Up to I so again, that would take if we were only returning 30% a year, that'd be a 10 year payback period. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's a long time.
Justin:That is a long time, actually. So and I'm probably getting some of those details wrong. But, that's kind of the general lay of the land. And I think you asked a good question which was, what does that actually get us? Meaning, what is this for and who is it for?
Justin:Like, why would we take the money and what would we use it for? Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Right. I yeah, I don't think at the time we talked about it, I really had a good idea of maybe neither do you, about how we would how we would use that. Like, how what we what we what was that money going what are we paying for?
Justin:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like, is it for us? Is it for marketing? Is it for to hire someone? Is it for hosting costs? Is it for something else?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Justin:Yeah. It's and part of I think we explained this before, but, you know, part of my initial interest in all these funds was my other business that's been kind of funding my life wasn't doing so good. But in the last few months, it's been doing better. And so it it kinda relieved that financial pressure for me. Right.
Justin:And, honestly, January February, I've been almost 80% of my time maybe on Transistor. So it I've had a lot of time these past few months to focus on transistor and, not worry about money, which is which is usually why you take money. Right?
Speaker 2:Right. Yeah. I think that's why we were talking about it and why we would have taken it is to sort of free up our time to do this.
Justin:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But I think, you know, the fact that you have that much time to devote to transistor, I think we're seeing that payoff
Justin:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:As far as, you know, you getting the word out and and, like, marketing marketing the platform.
Justin:Yeah. Yeah. It's been a good it seems to be working. Yeah. And so yeah.
Justin:In terms of what is this for? And then the question became for you, you know, like, it would this accelerate John being able to, you know, eventually leave paid employment. But on your side, you have a bunch of personal savings.
Speaker 2:All it would do is protect those savings, but, like, those savings are sort of for something like this. Like, it's it's even it's outside of of other investments I have for, let's say, retirement Mhmm. Or whatever. It's just like rainy day rainy day fund for a while if I need to.
Justin:Yeah. Yeah. And, my friend Ben Orenstein, that's exactly what he did. He had personal savings outside of his 401 k and all those things.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Justin:And he just said, you know, this is for building the company.
Speaker 2:Right.
Justin:I think he figured he had, you know, 12 months kind of runway and even more if he needed it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's, right. I mean, you can I haven't really run those numbers, but, like, it could be it could be a while? And, like, there's obviously expenditures I can reduce and and things I can sort of, look into in in my life and how I spend money and make reductions in that, and I think that would make that last a lot longer. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But, like, you know, I think the more we talk about it, it's the more we're like, well, we don't need it, then, like, what's what's the point? Like
Justin:Mhmm. At
Speaker 2:this at this point, I think the only the only reason we really wanna take it is if we wanted to hire someone else.
Justin:Yeah. And even that would be such well, first of all, I don't feel like we're really ready for that. Like
Speaker 2:No. I don't I don't think so either.
Justin:So we're not opposed to taking investment. But I think for now, what we've decided is we're just gonna wait. The
Speaker 2:the other thing is that
Justin:we're in terms of like, right now, we're at $7,636 in MRR. That's a annual run rate of 90 almost $92,000. So we're getting close to the an annual run rate of $100,000. And really, you know, it's not gonna be very much time before we could both take $50,000 in salary. And Right.
Justin:In in that case, you know, with Ernest, we would be theoretically, depending on what they offered us, we would be returning, you know, some profits to them. Not profits, some founder earnings to them. And so, that it it just doesn't seem like it makes sense because we're so close already.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So yeah. The other thing I I
Justin:met with a, there's a community loan agency here in Vernon that's government funded. And we're an American c corp, so this wouldn't apply to us. But it's an interesting thought experiment. They came to me and said, hey, we wanna get attract more tech startups to our town, which a lot of towns want to. And I said, okay, well, tell me about what you do.
Justin:And they say, well, traditionally, what we've done is funded folks, with govern it's government funded, and we fund folks that the banks won't fund. And in my head, I'm like, oh, that's interesting. That's exactly the problem with software companies. Right? Like, a bank will fund a coffee shop because you've got ovens and equipment and maybe a location that you can seize.
Justin:They they wanna be able to seize some capital assets. But software has had this problem that we can't get traditional loans because the banks are just they're still thinking too old school. They're not looking at the the crazy margins that software companies can do. Like, we talked about last time, like, 80% plus margins. And they're they're still looking at these very low margin businesses like retail and food services, but they won't give sovereign companies loans.
Justin:And what he said is that they've what they've typically done is give loans at it's a higher rate than commercial money, but it's about 9% right now. And I in my head, I'm like, 9%. I'm like, man, John and I would take that loan. You know? Because Yeah.
Justin:It right now, like, if if we had to return, you know, in the case of earnest, like 3 to 5 x, that's a huge percentage rate. And then if we had or if we had to give up, to tiny seed or indie VC, you know, 8% or higher equity, that means we have to return, you know, we have to give them dividends forever. Right? And a portion of our company if we sell. So, that's an interesting that's an interesting opportunity that may exist in our listeners' hometown.
Justin:Like, they might have community in Canada, there's, like, the BDC, but there's community futures. I'm sure these things exist in different states.
Speaker 2:Yeah. There's I mean, in the US, there's, credit unions, which are sort of like banks, but different in a way. Mhmm. They sometimes they sometimes have, like, business loans that are a little bit more approachable, I think.
Justin:Yeah. So I I mean, I I guess I'm just responding to the meme, which is all banks don't don't fund software companies, but I'm wondering if we need to investigate that a little bit more, because it does seem like there's agencies and, yeah, like you said, credit unions that may be willing to invest. Sorry, not invest. Loan you money.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Justin:Now there's a risk there that you'll have a kind of a personal guarantee. Like, you'll want to you'll have to you'll be on the hook to pay that back. I I wanna push back against that a little bit too. So theoretically, yes. Like you're, if, if you take investment, you can, you know, close-up shop and not pay back investors.
Justin:I think in practice, a lot of founders end up feeling kind of guilty about that. And Yeah. I mean and end up paying back investors anyway. You know what I mean?
Speaker 2:Right. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's also, there's also corporate credit cards. I mean, those generally have high interest rates, but, like, you know, we don't we don't have a credit card
Justin:at the moment. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:So we don't have a line we don't have a line of credit that we can just sort of, like, borrow against.
Justin:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Which at some point, maybe we should. I don't know.
Justin:Yeah. I think
Speaker 2:That's that's probably something to talk about with with an accountant or whatever.
Justin:But Yeah. I think that
Speaker 2:But even then, you could you can definitely get into some trouble if you're overspending and
Justin:Oh, for sure. Yeah. I the the yeah. That'd be a good topic for next time too. I'm sure actually this is the one segment people are just, like, screaming at their podcast players right now.
Justin:Because everyone has opinions about this stuff. Especially yeah. Like how much risk you should be taking as a founder? How much debt you should be taking on personally? How many personal guarantees do you should be giving?
Justin:You know, the the their credit card debt with entrepreneurs is a problem. There's lots of people that fund their startups on credit cards. And, Yeah. Sometimes it works out and sometimes it does not. And that is, can be really rough.
Justin:The other thing from Nathan Barry is when he was building ConvertKit and he he said, you know, when things were kind of going up into the right, everyone wanted to extend him credit. Everyone wanted to invest in the company, all that stuff. And he says in retrospect, he wishes he had applied for the line of credit when things were looking good. Because you don't need it when things are looking good, but you can't get it when things have gone bad.
Speaker 2:That's yeah. That's a good point.
Justin:So, anyway, that's kind of an update on investment. Do you wanna share a little bit about, what you've learned about corporate taxes?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So, we've been trying to wrap up our corporate taxes, and I had reached out to a friend of mine and asked him if he knew anyone or had worked with anyone to do, corporate taxes for him. And he sort of pointed me in the direction of this, this one guy that he has worked with.
Jon:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:So I finally met with him, this past weekend and, you know, brought all the information that kinda we had we had collected and organized to him and just talked over generally. I was probably there for, like, an hour. Just talked over, like, what we do, you know, how the last year has been. Here's our numbers, and, you know, what are the things we might need to do. It was interesting.
Speaker 2:It was, my friend Scott had warned me. He's like, this guy's a little eccentric. He's, but he's good at what he does. He might come off as a little weird. And so I show up at his at his office, which is actually also his place of res like, he lives there as well.
Speaker 2:So he works he he lives there and works on accounting with his wife. They both work together. He opens the door and introduces himself. He's wearing a Bernie 2020 shirt for Bernie Sanders, who just announced his campaign for the election and is, like, hoodie. Right?
Speaker 2:He's, like, not a businessman.
Justin:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And I'm like, alright. This is fine. I I don't care what he wears. Oh,
Justin:man. The the topic of the the title for this show has got to be we have a socialist accountant.
Speaker 2:Now he's also like an artist. He does like he makes art outside of, like, not during the busy season, but he, like, has art. He sells it in galleries, and, like, he was showing me his studio in his house. Anyway, it's pretty interesting. Outside of that, though, you know, he talked a lot about the changes to the US tax law under the current president and how, like, they've tried to make it friendlier to businesses and more attractive so that more businesses wanna start businesses in the US or not leave.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. But but the details there are a little bit they, like, lowered the tax rate for most corporations in the US, except that it used to be a tiered system where companies that didn't make as much money, that made a lot less money, actually had a much, much lower tax rate, but they got rid of those.
Justin:Oh, no.
Speaker 2:So it's just, like, even now. So it's an even percentage across every company no matter how much you make.
Justin:Gotcha. Which
Speaker 2:is terrible which is terrible for small business.
Justin:Oh, no.
Speaker 2:Although although that's only based you only get taxed on profits. So as long as you're, like, not necessarily profitable Yeah. Which, you know, includes, like, salaries and stuff is fine. Yeah. But it's just
Jon:like he's like, yeah. It's a
Speaker 2:little weird. Like, no one really knew that because it did so fast. Like, they didn't really get the word out. There's like a lot of it's a lot of little stuff.
Justin:So should we be worried? Are are are are we gonna have to pay, like, a $100,000 in taxes?
Speaker 2:No. No. No. Not at all. Because we didn't make that much money.
Speaker 2:But, like, we also we also base at the end of the year, we're, like, 0. We had no profit at the end of the year because we paid each other. Yeah. Yeah. All in all, like, it was it was interesting.
Speaker 2:Just chatting with him and, like, there's a lot of lot about taxes I didn't know Mhmm. As far as core corporate taxes and, like, we're a c corp, so we can do things a little differently. And we're not, like, personally accountable for some stuff, but we can also sort of, like, write some things off differently.
Justin:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Anyway, it it was, it was interesting. I
Justin:Yeah. I mean, it's funny. I was listening to Bootstrap Web the other day, and, Brian Kassel is one of the hosts there. And he said, I know this is gonna be boring, but I just gotta talk about accounting right now. And this is kind of the stuff that when you start a business, you never really think about.
Justin:Like, you and I spent a good amount of time on, the weekend, just going through our books line by line and categorizing things. Eventually, we'll hire people to do that. But right now, it's just us. We're just like and even though we have hardly any transactions, it still, like, takes time. And it's still, it's like something you have to do.
Justin:And there's also what they don't tell you in the blog post is there's kind of always a bit of kind of low level anxiety that can go to high anxiety about, am I doing this right? Is the government gonna audit us? You know, are we, is this the right way to categorize things? Are we missing something that might end up costing us a lot of money? And I guess the only solution to that is to find an accountant that you trust, who,
Speaker 2:you
Justin:know, supports Bernie Sanders.
Speaker 2:So it's good that, that
Justin:you did that. And ours is weird too. And there's actually a lot of startups that can increasingly identify with this, but we have, you know, a US based C Corp, but we have at least one founder outside of the US. And I know, my friends who started userlist.i0. Is that right?
Justin:They have a couple founders outside of, the US as well. And there's it just adds this whole other dynamic. 1 being, like, you are much better equipped to find a US based accountant to and in some ways, the burden also for some of the file, the paperwork and filing and stuff rests on you. So yeah. It's an interesting.
Justin:We gotta talk about the real stuff here.
Speaker 2:Well, you know, hopefully, when we yeah. When we file it here, it'll be all it'll be all legit and good.
Justin:That Bernie 2020 thing is that's so funny.
Speaker 2:It was great. It was like an oversized hoodie and a Bernie 2020 shirt. I'm like, this is interesting. Anyway, he was pretty fun to talk to you, though.
Justin:That's great. So we'll we'll let you know folks when when we pay our taxes and what we end up having to pay.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Another thing that I
Justin:just wanted to chat about quick is
Speaker 2:I I've been thinking a lot about and these
Justin:are kinda unformed thoughts. But how most successful businesses and most successful apps, they're always built on a platform that is bigger than themselves. And there's kind of tiers to this, but I'll give you some examples. Airbnb is the classic example. They really they to start out, they scraped Craigslist.
Justin:Like, they would, they had a page scraper that would go in, get all of the vacation rentals, scrape those, and then post them on Airbnb. And without that initial in those initial listings, Airbnb was a site with no listings. Right? And without Craigslist, they could have never done that. They needed a bigger platform to, build off of.
Justin:In the podcast world, really, all podcast businesses are built off of Apple Podcasts. They've created this huge podcast directory that is free for the the different, like, podcast players to access. Right? They'll via the API, they'll grab all of those shows so they can have some sort of directory. But even like us, we use the the iTunes directory for importing shows.
Justin:Right? And, the other thing that Apple's done is they've preinstalled the podcast app on every single iPhone. That's been huge for podcasting. That's a a big kind of fertile ground for people to build a podcasting business on. It it's actually arguable that if they hadn't done that, that we wouldn't be able to exist because there just wouldn't be enough people listening to podcasts.
Justin:You know, some of these weren't even built on top of the platform, but rather by siphoning users off of other platforms. I this is kind of like Airbnb Craigslist thing, but also Instagram. People forget that early on when you signed into Instagram, you signed in with your Twitter account, and it would grab all of your friends. So as soon as you signed in to Instagram with your Twitter account, it would find the people you were already following and the people that followed you, And it would it just seeded the Instagram kind of social graph with that information. And without them, in a sense, stealing users from Twitter, Instagram would have never worked.
Justin:And this is something that people don't talk about. I think there's this kind of myth that we're just as entrepreneurs and creative people, we're just going to be creating things out of nothing. But in reality, it's almost like the opposite. You have to be building off something else that already exists that has enough momentum that you can kind of ride on its coattails for a while. You know what I mean?
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's almost like the what is it? The everything is a remix video series where it's sort of, like, everything is based off of something else.
Justin:Mhmm. I forgot about that. Like, what is Vanilla Ice's Ice Ice Baby without the Under Pressure, riff. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Right.
Justin:So that's one thing. He's he's taking this one piece, and he's building on top of that. And that song kinda sucks without that that riff. Right?
Speaker 2:Right.
Justin:Yeah. Now he's also building on top of, you know, basically, you know, all the work that African Americans have been doing, creating the music, creating the movement. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Justin:Understandably, sometimes people get upset about this stuff. I think the and this is kind of I this I know this is such a messy topic. I just don't see anybody, even all of human cultural evolution from 1000000 of years ago, the without building on top of what has been built.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah. It's, yeah. It's, you know, that's the beauty of the Internet, I think.
Justin:Well, and even the Internet, what people don't realize is the Internet was someone else's platform. It was funded by the US government.
Speaker 2:Right.
Justin:Without that initial funding, you know, all of us capitalists are like, yeah. This is great. We're. But the the the initial Internet was completely funded by the US government. It wasn't a it wasn't something that businesses came up with.
Speaker 2:No. No. Yeah. And everything else was built to top of that, including, including, including what we're doing.
Justin:Yeah. Including Yeah.
Speaker 2:I mean, that's, you know, that's I think that's the that's the, the march of human progress, I think, is that sort of, like, it has to it has to be built on on a previous generation's progress or previous, you know, not even generation really. But
Justin:There yeah. There has to be something there. And that, you know, I I I sent this out to my newsletter list. And, one of my readers, Dave said, okay. Well, what have you been building on top of What what platforms have you been building on top of with Transistor?
Justin:I said, well, for sure, like, John's personal network in Chicago, that was one of the platforms that we stood on. Right? Something you've been building your entire career. My audience and community that I've been building for 10 years, product hunt, indie hackers, Cards Against Humanity even. Like, without cards, we don't have that first customer.
Justin:We don't have social proof. And then, you know, we have some these days, we have some affiliates that have built their own audiences that send quite a bit of traffic and business our way. Google itself is, you know, a search engine. A search engine. Of course, it's digital.
Justin:But Google itself, you know, send is it becoming a bigger source of leads first? It's a platform that we're building on top of. And then there's just RSS. Right? Like, that's a platform that's been around forever that we're building on top of.
Justin:And so, anyway, those are just kind of some unformed thoughts.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, I think yeah. It's, it's easy to forget, though. I think it's it's the stuff that people don't necessarily it's
Jon:visible.
Justin:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Like, it's, it's sort of an invisible thing. Like, you don't really like, we're not we're not out there marketing transistor necessarily with with that information upfront. Not that we're trying to hide it, but, like Yeah. The fact that we have, you know, affiliates that are helping us market and get new customers. We don't really
Justin:Yeah.
Speaker 2:We don't talk about that. So I think the yeah. Like you said, though, a lot of a lot of people either forget that a lot of these other companies were built on other platforms or are continuing to be built.
Justin:Yeah. There's I and of course, there's word-of-mouth, but there's always something initial or ongoing that's kind of fueling all of that. And that and we've talked about this before too. Like, Tim Ferris's podcast is popular because Tim Ferris had built a platform over years years years years. And if you go back into his story, how did he build that platform?
Justin:Well, he built it by, connecting into other people's audiences. Right? Even his show right now kind of does that. If he gets, Arnold Schwarzenegger on the show, everybody that loves Arnold is gonna come check out the show. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Justin:It I just kinda felt like addressing this myth of, like, well, I'll just build it and they'll come. Or if it's good enough, people will just come. But I I think people miss that everything that's big or successful, even like small little niche successes. You know, I know some people that run really popular not really, successful profitable, apps on top of Shopify. And they're making, you know, 200 to $300,000 a year in revenue.
Justin:But the platform that they've built on top of is massive. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And it's a huge key to their success.
Justin:Like Yes.
Speaker 2:They wouldn't they would have had to build their own e commerce platform. All the things that Shopify hooks into as far as managing your sales. Mhmm. Yeah.
Justin:Yes. So that's just an yeah. There's something there that I think is worth discussing. Let's yeah. Let's kind of close things off here.
Justin:Maybe just with the app update. You're you've been working on, so well, we've we've we've been working on this for a while. What is it?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, there's Spotify, which is, know, we integrate with Spotify as far as you can submit your show to Spotify using our, our connection to them. We've been working on pulling in the analytics from Spotify for a while and displaying those in your analytics dashboard, and people keep asking us, like, every week we have, like, you know, a handful of requests where you know, are my Spotify analytics in here? What are they under? Part of that is is on me for just, you know, running out of time to really focus on it.
Speaker 2:But Spotify is also sort of in this moving target as far as their their API and their podcasting platform in general is, like, really new and changing.
Justin:Yeah. Like, after months of radio silence, we just got, like, a pretty big update
Speaker 2:last week. Out of the blue, and it wasn't even it wasn't even a reply to any we asked. It was just like, here's an update to our API with new stuff. We're like, okay.
Justin:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Now I guess we'll look back into it and see what we can use.
Justin:Yeah. Which is actually it's it's so interesting just as an aside, how important communication is and constant communication because, and maybe we're guilty of this too, but when, when all of a sudden you haven't heard from someone in months months months, and then you hear from them, it's, it's, it's almost as if I would prefer, I wish you had they'd just dripped that out over time.
Speaker 2:Right. Like
Justin:give me some time to anticipate what's coming as opposed to just like, hey, here we go. It's like, woah. Like, where this guy comes from? Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It doesn't really break anything we've done already, but it it does add some some nice stuff. So, we'll we'll figure finish that up pretty soon.
Justin:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Other than that, you know, I I finished up some some, like, billing updates.
Justin:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:For people to be able to sort of manage their billing and, some issues around delinquent customers who have not paid in a few months.
Justin:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:Which I think will be it'll be a good update.
Justin:Oh, you know, another cool update you did was we got that feedback from, from Matt at Supercomputer.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Justin:Maybe just tell people what that was about.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. So so, Matt, he emailed us and had a few questions about their website, their hosted website on transistor. It's supercomputer.fm, I think it is. So they enable the option to have a URL for an episode be the episode number. So you can go to supercomputer.fm/one, and it would go to the first episode.
Speaker 2:What we didn't account for and sort of forgot about was the fact that you can now set multiple seasons in a show.
Justin:Yes.
Speaker 2:It's like a new iTunes RSS tag that they support, and we support it as well. So you can say, alright. I have season 1, episode 1, but I can also you know, after 20 episodes of season 1, I can be like, oh, now we're gonna start season 2 in the new year. So now we have season 2, episode 1. And if you wanted to go to episode 1 of supercomputer at supercomputer.fm/one, which season is that?
Speaker 2:And we just sort of forgot about it.
Justin:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And so I, implemented a fix, so you can go to, supercom supercomputer.fm/s2 /one, which is season 2 episode 1. But you can also go to trying to think how many episodes they had. I think they had 20 episodes in the first season. So you could actually go to supercomputer.fm/21, and it should actually go to season 2, episode 1 as well because it's, like, the 21st episode overall. So I was trying to make it so you we didn't break previous links, but also worked with new links.
Speaker 2:So that's rolled out. There's another update I gotta finish for another customer who has, I think, a handful of bonus episodes, which they don't wanna be necessarily episode numbers, but still need to show up in order. I think I have a good solution for that. It gets a little weird because Itunes still wants a bonus episode to be an episode number as far as how they're ordered in the feed. But within transistor, within the websites we have and we host, it shouldn't say you know, let's say the bonus episode is the 21st episode of the of the year.
Speaker 2:It shouldn't say episode 21. It should say, like, bonus episode 1. And then episode 21 would be the next episode or whatever. It get it gets a little weird, but, I think I figured out a way to do it.
Justin:Actually, that's a good point about I think there's too many folks try to overengineer at the beginning and account for every possible thing that might go wrong.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And it it's
Justin:You can't do that. You just have to in this case, it was great. Matt reached out to us, and we saw it right away. Oh, this is something that we should definitely fix. And then we fixed it.
Justin:It was better to get the the product out into real people's hands and have them using it instead of trying to over engineer it from the beginning.
Speaker 2:Right. Yep. Yeah. And you don't know it. You don't know everything at the beginning, or there's things you forget about.
Speaker 2:And, like, luckily, Matt wasn't, you know, he wasn't like an irate customer. He was like, what is this? What am I paying for?
Justin:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:He just suggested it and
Justin:took care
Speaker 2:of it.
Justin:Nice.
Speaker 2:And now everyone else can benefit.
Justin:Now everyone else can benefit too. Exactly. Alright. Thanks thanks for listening everybody. I'm just going to tell you about our great monthly supporters.
Justin:Podcast insights.com has been one of our longest running supporters. They, have been really generous with sponsoring this show. And if you haven't checked out their how to create a podcast guide yet, go to podcast insights.com. It's right on the homepage if you just look on the left hand side. So go and check that out.
Justin:By the way, we have some new sponsors coming online next month. So, if you're if you you're like, oh, you know what? I've already signed up for a lead to and podcast insights. Well, we've got some fresh sponsors coming. Let me just go through our Patreon supporters.
Justin:But then, John, you've got, actually, why don't you start with our our our our brand new Patreon supporter?
Speaker 2:Alright. We have we have a new supporter this month or this week, Dan Buddha. Sounds like he might be related to me, which he is. He's my brother.
Justin:Man, you folks get the best domain names. Because he's got danbudda.com, and you've got johnbudda.com.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We're pretty lucky with the online usernames because they're never taken.
Justin:Oh my god. I'm gonna change my name to Justin Buddha.
Speaker 2:Yeah. There you go. You'll yeah.
Justin:Because they're they're short. It's like danbuddha.com. That's perfect.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. So thanks, Dan. I owe you a visit. Anyway, Dan, is down in Austin.
Speaker 2:He's been doing a bunch of coding lately. If anybody is looking to, hire someone, he's he's, he's free for some projects probably. Oh, nice. Dan danbudda.comor@danielbudda on Twitter.
Justin:Nice. Great. And our other monthly supporters are Darby Frey, Kyle Fox at get rewardful.com, Samori, Augusto, Dave Young, Brad from Canada, Kevin Markham, Sammy Schuichert, Dan Erickson, Mike Walker, Adam Duvander, Dave Junta.
Speaker 2:Giunta.
Justin:And, podcast insights dot com, which I already told you about. Thanks again, everybody, and we will see you next week.
